Oracle’s new in-memory database technology, which moves
work from disk drives to memory chips, can speed up data
analysis and online commerce, Ellison said in a keynote address
to open the customer conference in San Francisco. The
billionaire, whose sailing team is trailing Emirates Team New
Zealand in the America’s Cup, was framed by eight giant screens
showing yacht racing videos before he spoke about enhancing its
flagship product.

Revenue growth at Oracle is slowing amid competition in the
business-applications market from Salesforce.com Inc., Workday
Inc. and other providers of online software. The world’s biggest
database-software provider is unveiling new products targeting
customers of SAP AG and International Business Machines Corp. at
OpenWorld, including a high-end system that can tackle more
data-processing jobs with faster chips.

“We can process data at ungodly speeds,” he said. “The
answers are coming back faster than you can come up with the
questions.”

While Ellison has been making acquisitions and investing in
cloud tools that run over the Web, Oracle remains dependent on
sales of programs installed on customers’ servers.

Sparc Chips

To spur sales, Ellison is unveiling a package of hardware
and software to speed up Oracle’s database software, co-president Mark Hurd said in an interview at Oracle’s Redwood
City, California, headquarters last week. The machine features
the Sparc chip gained in Oracle’s acquisition of Sun
Microsystems.

“License growth has stalled,” said Brent Thill, an
analyst at UBS AG in San Francisco, who recommends buying the
shares. “They’re underperforming the software market.”

Oracle needs new hardware to fuel growth, said Pat
Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC in San Francisco who
rates the company’s shares at market perform, the equivalent of
a hold rating.

At the same time, Oracle sells a set of applications called
Fusion that businesses can use to manage sales, supply chain,
human resources and financial information. The company also
acquired cloud companies in similar areas, including Taleo and
RightNow Technologies.

Cloud Services

Hurd said Oracle is the only business-software company that
can offer a suite of Web-delivered tools for a wide range of
applications. The marketing could be better, he said.

“This cloud suite is going to be a big deal,” he said.
“You could argue we could have better awareness, and do more
marketing, but you can’t argue the strategy.”

Part of that involves a new Oracle database called 12c,
which was introduced earlier this year and targets businesses
delivering cloud-computing services. The upgraded machine’s in-memory option will let companies run applications using faster
memory instead of disk drives. SAP already offers an in-memory
database called Hana.

Oracle also unveiled a new high-end Sun Microsystems server
with an upgraded M6 chip. John Fowler, Oracle’s executive vice-president for systems who joined as part of the Sun acquisition
four years ago, said in a recent interview that Sun’s product
line needed lots of updating, a multiyear process.

“It was old when we came into Oracle,” Fowler said. “It
moved from being old to being antique.”

‘Memory Machine’

Oracle’s new “Big Memory Machine” will accept boards
using the M6 chip that doubles the number of processing cores
compared with the Sparc M5 chip, which was announced in March.
The new system will run Oracle’s in-memory database and is now
available.

Oracle’s combination of database software, business
applications and hardware has attracted investors like Stephen
Yacktman, co-chief investment officer at Yacktman Asset
Management Co. in Austin, Texas. The firm, which owns more than
20 million Oracle shares, according to a June 30 filing, made
the investment at the end of the second quarter.

“They just have a great entrenched position with their
database,” Yacktman said in an interview. “They don’t need to
be in the latest trend in a year. They just need to get around
to it.”

Ellison’s pay package declined 18 percent to $78.4 million
for fiscal 2013 after he gave up an annual bonus and the company
missed some of its profit targets, according to a filing with
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Worth $41.8 billion and ranking eighth on the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index, Ellison, 69, was the highest-paid CEO in the
U.S. this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.